Seven Tips for Search Engine Friendly Sites

by Karl Cleveland

#1 - Focus on Great Content

Quality, relevant content is most important.

• Focus on having great content.
• Have content that is unique or serves a niche.
• Search engines want to have quality, relevant search results and try to provide it. If you provide quality, relevant content, they will like you.
• Users want and will share good content. Sharing is good, which brings us to #2...

#2 - Cultivate Popularity

Make sure other sites link to you.

• How many other sites link to you (link popularity) is a critical factor for search engines. For search engines in-links are like votes. The more votes for a particular site, the higher it will rise in the rankings.
• Links from large, established, and respected sites count more than links from small sites (e.g. a link from the NY Times will do more to boost your rankings than a link from a small blog).
• How other sites link to you is important. The text used in their links and the contexts in which the links are placed are important factors. For example, the link "We enjoyed this restaurant" within a website or blog would be less useful to search engines than a link with specific keywords such as "Karl's Thai Food Palace has the best Pad Thai in Oceanside."
• These factors may be beyond your control (somewhat), but people will link to you if you have quality content to offer (see #1).

#3 - Have a Search Friendly Site Design

Optimize your code to make it friendly to search engines.

• Include unique title tags on each page.
• Use appropriate semantic markup.
• Have a clear, easy hierarchy of information that includes header tags.
• Have important, descriptive content at the top of the page.
• Add alt tags on images and other accessibility elements.
• Have a relatively simple navigational structure with well-written descriptive anchor tags (links).
• Include useful meta information including a description tag and robots.txt information.

#4 - Include Keywords in Key Places

Use words in your site that people might use to find your site.

• Include keywords in the title tag, in your h1 and/or other headers, and within the body text of your document.
• Include keywords in file names, folder names, and domain names.
• Include useful, descriptive links.
• Research what keywords people might use to find you and include these words within the natural (not overly manipulated) context of your content.

#5 - Don't Do Bad Stuff

Trying to manipulate search engines may get you blacklisted.

• Don't try to manipulate search engines through hidden text, link farms, spamming, cloaking, or other techniques.
• Avoid excessive keyword stuffing, using lists of keywords or irrelevant keywords, or using keywords in such a way as to make your content unnatural or less useful.
• Don't duplicate content across sites/pages.
• Don't have overly long pages.
• Don't hide content or urls.
• Don't put important text/content in images.
• Don't have complex and deep directory structures.

#6 - Be Old and Be Fresh

Both recency and history help.

• The longer your site has been around serving up content focused around particular topics, the better.
• But, new, recent content is desired by search engines too.
• So, a site with a deep history that also serves up fresh content is best.

#7 - Share Your Stuff

Make sure people know you exist.

• Submit your URL to search engines and include a xml sitemap.
• Share and try to cultivate links to your content.
• Use social media (facebook, youtube, blogs, etc.) to your advantage.